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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28336299">The Station</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant'>ecrivant</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Study, Depression, Desire, F/F, Guilt, Intimacy, LGBTQ Themes, Repression</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:56:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,234</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28336299</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>That night, one marked by abject sin and rapture: Annie’s single, inescapable memory.  She, forever haunted by this painfully raw thought of you.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Annie Leonhart/Reader, Annie Leonhart/You</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Station</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is technically a reader insert but it’s honestly just an exploration of annie’s repression and sadness.  also, in general, i’m very wary of assigning gender to the reader, but the lgbt+ themes are important to this story, so annie’s love interest is a fem!reader.  i’m sorry if this excludes anyone, next piece will return to the usual gn!reader.  </p><p>very much an au + me experimenting with style. </p><p>c.w. – homophobic slurs</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>At the world’s marge lies a service station—carburant siphoned long ago, insides, bare.  Its skeletal façade abuts a backroad, a display of collapsing substructure succored by gusts of vagrants and drifters, cataracted from history’s view.  At one time, when you entered, the clerk would greet you from the left with a gaze that conveyed a hesitant familiarity—the type of trivial recognition that was unimportant in the moment but retrospectively haunting.  The lights within, garish halogen, were ceaseless, always alight, and only dared to die out once the ceiling caved, and the walls peeled, and the vinyl floor cratered like some artificial topography.  The edifice now no more than a nebulous memory only existing in the minds of those who ever once visited it. </p><p>A memory nonetheless in the mind of the woman who fucks for the first time in a sedan parked behind the station, where the smell of sex and summer air and gasoline is seared into her brain as she breathes hard, lightheaded and high on ecstasy and fear.  She feels her own death, a quiet specter which guides the touch of her lover.  Her burning skin; the eroticism of demise, destruction.  The nocturnal breeze gasps with her.</p><p>She offers to drive you home.  You—flushed and debauched, breasts exposed.  Eying her intensely.  You refuse.</p><p>“I can walk.”</p><p>She laughs.  Your name on her lips, a carnal, depraved prayer, “We don’t even know where we are.”</p><p>She is corrected.  Curt.</p><p>“<em>You</em> don’t.”</p><p>She is gored, laid open and vulnerable and bare for this stranger who parts without another word.  She watches you go, ambling towards the unlit dirt road, swallowed by a beastly darkness.  The vehicle, suffused by an amorous smog, windows opaque.  Her organs all but spill onto the floor, mixing with dust and dog hair and garbage and an old takeaway cup that was always there no matter how many times she threw it away. </p><p>She slinks into the station and asks for a pack of cigarettes.  She pays in coins, a button among them, but the cashier never notices.</p><p>At home.</p><p>“Mama’s been askin’ ‘bout you.”</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>“You’re gonna get an earful tomorrow.”</p><p>She’s already halfway up the stairs.  They moan beneath her. </p><p>“She thinks you’ve been spending too much time with that Eren boy.  Is that where you was tonight?”</p><p>The stairs sound like you.  Everything sounds like you—the gasp of a closing door, the sordid exhale of a creaking bedframe.  The sweat on her face: a lover’s curious tongue.</p><p>—</p><p>“Pull off here, ya’re low on gas.”</p><p>Prick prick pricks of fear smart on her skin.  Mama knows.  The station, the unholy consecration.  Mama knows.  This car, this place.  Mama knows.  Her brother in the back, resting on the shadow of his sister’s bare figure.  The pop of the fuel door says dyke.  The crack of the gas nozzle trigger says fag.  The unseen eyes that bore through her say queer.  She enters the station to pay.  The clerk, a gaze of recognition—the only one who knows of her transgressions. </p><p>—</p><p>She is married.  Cheers to the happy couple.  She cries on her wedding night, tears staining bedsheets—her own virginal blood.  He touches her, stagnant, pale skin collied by bereft contact.  She only comes when she thinks of the station.</p><p> —</p><p>She could tell.  She could tell him and free herself, and then the kid’ll wonder why Mommy’s never around and Daddy’s a druggie and a drunk and never leaves the house anymore and the kid’ll make his way through the social services system until he’s beaten and cracked and broken like Mama’s old doll collection smashed against the wall and he puts a bullet in his head before he turns eighteen.  No, she could never tell.</p><p>—</p><p>Thanksgiving.  She stares at her sister-in-law—a city girl, with heavy lids and blush-dusted cheeks and a pronounced cupid’s bow.  The eyes of a hunter, the lascivious gaze of a she-wolf.  Her husband comments on how well they seem to get along.  </p><p>—</p><p>A loneliness begotten from her own bones, born from emptiness and the inimitable way she and death caressed all those years ago.  She only has a name to utter, breathless, when thoughts of you tenant her mind.  The first and the only fuck was truly a stranger, all but nameless in memory. </p><p>—</p><p>Her mother’s funeral.  An apathetic and unfamiliar affair.  People she doesn’t know.  Her brother, his wife, their child.  Her husband, her child, her.  She could not be more distant.</p><p>Her childhood home smells sweetly of tobacco and cardamom. </p><p>Indifference during the wake mistaken by the others for numbness.  She feels no need to mourn—her mother lived and died uneventfully, and that was it. </p><p>“Mommy, are Grandma’s dolls going away?”</p><p>“I don’t know, we’ll see.”</p><p>“Do you think I can keep one?”</p><p>The boy has his eyes fixed on one in particular, his implicit selection.  The one that has your eyes.  The one whose gaze makes her squirm.  Mama knows.</p><p>“I don’t know, we’ll see.”</p><p>—</p><p>She sneaks away from the house with a pack of her mother’s cigarettes, the box crumpled and stained at the edges and the tubes inside wrinkled and mildewed, emitting a stench that filled her with inexplicable nostalgia.  It brings to mind her unshakable compulsion to eat cigarettes, to feel the flakes of tobacco coat the inside of her mouth like the ground dregs in a cup of cheap coffee.  She lights one instead, pushing the thought aside—if she was to ever eat one, she fears she would not be able to stop.  The low hiss of her inhalations on the ember briefly joins the sonic ambience.  She sits in her car and smokes and occasionally flicks ash outside of her window with shaking hands.  Rancid and familiar aftertaste.  Thick dust clouds kicked up by her car tires coalesce with her hazy exhalations as she drives nowhere.  Not nowhere.  She needs gas.</p><p>—</p><p>The station still stands as it had before, insusceptible to time.  Always seemingly aged.  Covered in an ever-present grime.  She gets out and leans against her car and drags on her cigarette, the virulent inhalations scratching her lungs.  The road on which you disappeared all those years ago looked profoundly unremarkable during the day—just a long, dirt road in a town wholly comprised of long, dirt roads.  The heat shimmers above the ground, and the afternoon sun drapes itself across her skin, and the hot breeze drags its fingertips through her hair like a lover you’d meet behind a bar—the same who would abandon that perpetually lit cigarette between her lips in exchange for her mouth on yours.</p><p>Her last drag—she drops the butt and crushes it underfoot. </p><p>She sits in her car and smokes the rest of the pack—in her eyes, the final remnants of her mother.</p><p>She waits in the parking lot.  As if her presence alone would invoke some bygone wraith. </p><p>Her hand reaches under her dress, between her legs, and she is touching herself to the pervasive miasma of summer breeze and carburant, and the darkness of closed eyes almost feels like the night, and her frantic digital movements are arrant pleasure until they’re not; she stops and is suddenly crying, and her thoughts are occluded by her mother’s pale, dead face, and she realizes that Mama’s death, mundane as it was, represents the furthest she’s been from that singular night years ago which was so verily marked by sin and rapture; the one that has haunted her and will continue to haunt her until she herself dies an uneventful death after an uneventful life, and her child thinks of her passing as she does her own mother’s: a nonevent among nonevents. </p><p>She is met with understanding eyes as she returns to the wake crying. </p><p>—</p><p>She moves to the city with husband and child.  Suburbia forgone.  The apartment is small and cramped and reminiscent of her sister-in-law’s.  The adjacent view from the living-room window is an identical high-rise—ten stories of the same brick and dirty-white AC units.  She is filled with an ineffable sadness as she stares at the spare greenery in streets below, confined to plots of dry soil surrounded by cracked and potholed pavement.</p><p>Her sleeplessness often leads her to the living room long after the apartment falls to silence.  One night, she watches, captivated, as a couple in the adjacent apartment fucks on a couch, curtains wide open and shame forgotten.  The man, hovering above a body obstructed, is suddenly flipped on his back and mounted by his lover, and she swears this woman, breasts bobbing, and face marked by a concentrated intensity and unusually devoid of pleasure, looks like you.  </p><p>—</p><p>Two years in the city bypass her as if she were already dead.  The tenant who resembled you moved out the year prior. </p><p>—</p><p>She sits in a booth sequestered in the corner of a dark and begrimed barroom.  Alone for the night.  Her husband no longer questions her bouts of silence and absences from the house and disdain for intimacy; her child, accustomed to fissure. </p><p>She ignites a cigarette, her lukewarm liquor no longer of interest, and no one stops her.  She is indifferent to the other patrons, who were, at this point in the night, nothing more than hazy and incorporeal forms populating the shadows.</p><p>The chime of the door—jarring and tangible—cuts through the muted atmosphere and demands the attention of those there to give it.  Another specter drifts to the bar.  A woman shouldering something—a fact elucidated by a hunched posture and a quiet request for three fingers of scotch. </p><p>And then the woman turns, and Annie sees her face. </p><p>And suddenly she is collapsed on the scum-covered tile of the bar’s bathroom floor, hurling upchuck into the toilet.  That woman had your face—she is not you, at least not anymore, as Annie is no longer the girl who fucked and died in that gas station parking lot years ago.  But that woman had your face.  And she looked at Annie with your eyes, melancholic eyes which held no recognition for her, and turned away in the same movement.  Less than a look—a glance.  But that woman had your face.  And Annie had not seen it again before she hied to the bathroom to regurgitate four drinks and years of accrued and bilious agony. </p><p>The bathroom door swings open.  Groaning hinges.  She knows it’s that woman who has callously co-opted your likeness.</p><p>She enters the stall next to her and pisses and flushes the toilet whose water drains slowly and weakly, and the sounds of the sink are harsh and cacophonous against the tile walls.  Steps towards the exit suddenly pause.  A knock on the stall door.  Your voice asks if she is alright—a voice unheard for decades, last encountered in a low, debauched whisper against her skin.</p><p>She heaves, again, but nothing is left to expel; she coughs and spits and does not answer.</p><p>“Can I at least help you get home?”</p><p>The question looms above her, looped and tied like a noose. </p><p>“I can walk.”</p><p>A laugh.  Dry, unfamiliar, never heard.  It’s harsh and barking; a warning. </p><p>She is corrected, curt: “You can barely stand.”</p><p>She had long been unacquainted with fear, now more often than not consumed by a vacant numbness, and she admittedly did not miss it.  It was ugly and pervasive and bore deep within her with debilitating potency.  She could do nothing but sit on the disgusting tile floor with body supported on yellowed porcelain and wait. </p><p>She imagines she allows herself to believe this woman is you—you, as you were, unchanged—and opens the door.  And you, being unchanged, ask if she would like to come home with you.  And she, apparently the same as well, says yes.  And back at your apartment, cluttered and cramped yet simultaneously vacant, you spare no time backing her into the bedroom, lips tethered to hers in lurid predation.  Touches that are lustful and intimate and familiar only to her.  She cannot bring herself to care that you do not remember her—your breath on her neck and your incursive touch efface all thoughts, good or bad.  She wants you on top of her, around her, within her, and you oblige like some prurient altruist.  Her coming is purgative and cathartic, and the pleasure of that night at the station feels archaic and antiquated in the face of this wholly new gratification, heighted by an immense and prolonged yearning.  And this time, after you are both finished, you do not part and neither does she, and she embraces you in a way that feels intrinsic, and you ask her to stay the night.  And she does not think of her husband and child as she says yes.  And she does not think of her husband and child as she agrees to spend the next day with you, as she dances with you in your living room, finally and only feeling held and loved.  Finally, finally, finally. </p><p>—</p><p>But Annie says nothing.  And the woman—not you, but an apparition—softly and finally knocks on the door with the side of her fist, unfazed, and walks out of the bathroom.  And even now, as she slumps further and shuts her eyes and clutches her head, Annie can only think of that <em>fucking</em> gas station. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hi there!  thank you so much for reading; i hope you enjoyed this piece.  it’s a little different than my other stuff, not drastically so, but still different.  i think i like it, though.</p><p>thank you to the tumblr anon who suggested i write something for annie, i really appreciate the request.  i have another request in the pipeline for reiner, so expect a piece for him soon. </p><p>as always, feedback and criticism are very much appreciated!  feel free to drop in and request something at my tumblr or here if you want!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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